When people look online for information about humanitarian crises, they increasingly
encounter media content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. This includes
everything from rumour and exaggeration to partisan journalism and completely invented stories
designed to look like real news (so-called ‘fake news’). This article shows that
disinformation is causing real and serious harm to those affected by humanitarian emergencies;
it can undermine the ability of humanitarian workers to provide relief; and it has exacerbated
conflict and violence. Disinformation is also making it harder for journalists to report on the
humanitarian sector, and hold the powerful to account, because it undermines audience trust in
information more generally. The article concludes by considering interventions that could
address the challenges of disinformation. It argues for more support of quality journalism
about humanitarian crises, as well as media literacy training. Finally, it is crucial that aid
agencies and news outlets commit to accuracy and fact checking in their reporting and
campaigning.

Abstract

When people look online for information about humanitarian crises, they increasingly
encounter media content that blurs the line between reality and fiction. This includes
everything from rumour and exaggeration to partisan journalism and completely invented stories
designed to look like real news (so-called ‘fake news’). This article shows that
disinformation is causing real and serious harm to those affected by humanitarian emergencies;
it can undermine the ability of humanitarian workers to provide relief; and it has exacerbated
conflict and violence. Disinformation is also making it harder for journalists to report on the
humanitarian sector, and hold the powerful to account, because it undermines audience trust in
information more generally. The article concludes by considering interventions that could
address the challenges of disinformation. It argues for more support of quality journalism
about humanitarian crises, as well as media literacy training. Finally, it is crucial that aid
agencies and news outlets commit to accuracy and fact checking in their reporting and
campaigning.

Introduction

In 2014, a campaign group posted a video on YouTube called ‘Syrian hero boy’. The
clip showed a young boy dramatically running through gunfire to save a girl, and it quickly went
viral. The video was viewed more than five million times and republished on the websites of
mainstream news outlets around the world, including the Daily Telegraph,
Independent, Daily Mail and New York Post. It was also
shared by the organisation Syria Campaign, which attached a petition calling on world leaders to
stop the conflict.

There was just one problem: the video wasn’t real. It was the creation of 34-year-old
director Lars Klevberg, and it was filmed in Malta with child actors, using a set from the movie
Gladiator. Klevberg said he wanted the video to start a conversation about the
impact of war on children. Critics said he had gone too far: that the video created confusion and
cynicism, which undermined attempts to address conflict in Syria (Salyer, 2014).

‘Syrian hero boy’ was not an isolated incident. When audiences look online for
information about humanitarian crises, they increasingly encounter media content that blurs the
line between reality and fiction. This includes everything from rumours and exaggerations on
social media, through to partisan journalism, satire and completely invented stories that are
designed to look like real news articles. Although this media content varies enormously, it is
often grouped together under nebulous and all-encompassing terms such as ‘fake
news’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘post-truth’ media.

Scholars have started to pay serious attention to the production and impact of all these forms
of disinformation. But they have not yet closely examined their impact in humanitarian crises.
This is a remarkable oversight. In humanitarian crises, false information can have life-and-death
consequences. As Jeanne Bourgault, President and Chief Executive Officer of Internews, states,
false information can ‘undercut efforts to improve health, make disasters worse than they
already are, alienate vulnerable populations, and even incite violence’ (quoted in Igoe, 2017).

This article introduces the emerging research about online disinformation and the many forms it
can take. It then considers the impact of this disinformation on humanitarian crises, identifying
a number of cases where it has caused real harm for those affected by disaster. Even more
troubling, perhaps, is the impact it may have on audiences in the long term and their willingness
to trust the news media when it provides important information or holds those with power to
account. The article finishes by examining the groups that are producing disinformation about
humanitarian crisis and asking what can be done.

F*** News and Disinformation

In 2017, Collins Dictionary declared ‘fake news’ its word of
the year. But most media scholars would prefer the term was removed from the English lexicon, as
it is vague and can be deployed to advance a political agenda. Donald Trump famously uses the
phrase ‘fake news’ to refer to a wide range of media content that he
doesn’t like. And audiences take a similarly broad approach; in focus groups, Nielsen and Graves (2017) find that audiences define
‘fake news’ to include partisan journalism, propaganda and advertising as well as
invented stories that masquerade as news reports.

Attempting to add clarity to the debate, journalism commentator and researcher Claire Wardle (2017) suggests that we should distinguish
between different types of fake news, paying attention to: 1) the nature and type of the
content, 2) the motivation of the producer and 3) how it is disseminated. From this analysis,
Wardle suggests there is a spectrum of fake news: at one end is satire and parody –
content that has no intention to cause harm but can potentially fool audiences; in the middle
there is content that is taken out of context or manipulated; and at the other end is news
content that is 100 per cent false and is designed to deceive (see also Tandoc et al., 2018).

None of these different types of fake news are new. The news media have long published
exaggerations, false information, propaganda and conspiracy theories, presenting them as truth.
In the 1830s, for example, New York Post published a series of articles
claiming that life had been found on the moon (Tworek and
Hamilton, 2018). Staged and fabricated content was also common during the
American-Spanish war, and it continued through the ‘penny press’ era in the US,
where duelling editors sought to grow their readership with fantastical and scandalous accounts
of events (Tucher, 1994).

Although it is not new, two factors are making the challenges of disinformation far more acute
today. The first is technology. The internet has led to an explosion of all information sources
– both truthful and false – and the sheer quantity of sources makes it
increasingly difficult to delineate the two. When the celebrated British philosopher Onora
O’Neill gave the 2002 Reith lectures, she
predicted these challenges to come:

It is quite clear that the very technologies that spread information so easily and
efficiently are every bit as good at spreading misinformation and disinformation…
[people] may not heed available evidence and can mount loud and assertive campaigns for or
against one or another position whether the available evidence goes for or against their
views.

It is now very cheap and easy for anyone to spread falsehoods – for a motivated
individual to create a website that looks like it is a traditional news outlet or to make a
false claim on social media and watch it go viral. The extent of this issue was confirmed in a
recent, massive study of online information flows published in Science, which
analysed the spread of approximately 126,000 ideas across millions of tweets. This analysis
found that ‘falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly
than truth in all categories of information’ (Vosoughi et al., 2018: 1146). Other studies have shown that the most
‘successful’ fabricated stories can attract more likes and retweets than the most
popular and accurate stories published in the mainstream media (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017).

These findings cut to the heart of some of our most celebrated ideals about free speech and
democracy. For centuries, liberal philosophers have argued that open debate and discussion will
edge us closer to the truth. As John Milton proclaimed in 1644, ‘Let [truth] and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in
a free and open encounter?’ Two centuries later, John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most
famous advocate of free speech, made a similar argument. He suggested that if we can only stand
up and freely challenge false ideas then we will see ‘the clearer perception and livelier
impression of truth, produced by its collision with error’ (1859: 33). This central tenet
is called into question by the chaos of online misinformation, channelled and amplified through
social media.

A second phenomenon has made the challenge of disinformation more acute today: the behaviour
of political elites. More specifically, the willingness of leaders, even those in supposedly
liberal democratic states, such as the US, UK and Italy, to lie to the public or disregard
evidence. Donald Trump is, of course, the most famous example of this phenomenon. According to
the Washington Post fact checkers, in his first 600 days in office, President
Trump made 5,001 false or misleading claims (Washington Post, 2018). This disregard for facts is said to have
contributed to a wider ‘post-truth’ political landscape in the US – that
is, a culture in which empirical evidence plays a vastly reduced role (McIntyre, 2018). In addition, Trump’s attacks on the news media have
created additional confusion about which information sources can be trusted (Mourão et al., 2018), and this
allows disinformation and falsehoods to flourish.

Disinformation and Humanitarian Crises

There have not been any systematic studies of the quantity or reach of disinformation about
humanitarian issues. But there are many anecdotal examples that have been documented –
and there is reason to think that the phenomenon is causing real and extensive harm.

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, websites masquerading as news outlets published
false stories about the causes and cures of the disease. In Nigeria, two people died and twenty
were hospitalised after drinking excessive quantities of salt water, which they read would
protect them from the disease (Neporent, 2014). In
the US, multiple websites published false news stories that contained alarmist accounts, one
claiming that an entire town in Texas was being quarantined after a family tested positive for
the virus. The story was shared more than 300,000 times (Dzieza, 2014) and may have contributed to the wider landscape of panic and xenophobia
surrounding the epidemic.

Online disinformation has also exacerbated conflict. In South Sudan, the UN reports that
social media ‘has been used by partisans on all sides, including some senior government
officials, to exaggerate incidents, spread falsehoods and veiled threats, or post outright
messages of incitement’ (UN Security Council,
2016: 10). In one instance, a false news story, published on the website
SouthSudanNation.com, stated that a general was planning to ‘massacre
Equatorians’. The story spread through WhatsApp, YouTube and Facebook as well as offline
networks, and was used ‘to mobilize others to take up arms to counter the
“attack”’ (Reeves, 2017; see
also Lynch, 2017).

Finally, false news has made it more difficult for relief organisations to operate.
Organisations working with migrants in the Mediterranean, for example, have been targeted in
fake-news attacks (Magee, 2018). Sean Ryan, Director
of Media at Save the Children, describes his organisation’s experience:

In the Mediterranean our search and rescue operations have been falsely accused of colluding
with traffickers. It started as a report in the Italian media and then Defend Europe, the
far-right group, hired their own boat to try and stop what we were doing. Breitbart released a
video which purported to prove our collusion with traffickers but showed nothing of the kind.
We had to fight this propaganda without many resources…

(cited in ibid.: 8)

These allegations suck up valuable resources, not least by requiring public-relations and
legal responses. More importantly, they can feed into and foster an anti-migrant climate and
increase mistrust towards NGOs and their interventions.

In addition to these short-term consequences, disinformation may have a profound long-term
impact by undermining the trust that citizens place in all sources of information. Research
shows that audiences are confused and concerned about disinformation, and they struggle to know
which sources of news to trust. A 2018 Pew Centre study found that 42 per cent of Americans
believe the news media ‘fabricate stories frequently’ (Guess et al., 2018). And America is not exceptional. The
Reuters Digital News Report 2018, which surveyed more than 70,000 people around the world, found
that over half (54 per cent) of respondents were concerned about their ability to distinguish
real and fake information on the internet. Similarly, the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, which
surveyed more than 30,000 people in 28 countries, found a remarkable 59 per cent support the
phrase ‘I am not sure what is true and what is not’ (Edelman, 2018).

Among other issues, this lack of trust makes it much harder for journalists to do their job
– to provide information about humanitarian issues and to hold those with power to
account. The news media has historically played an important (albeit imperfect) role in
supporting the response to humanitarian emergencies: by providing surveillance and early
warning, raising awareness and monitoring the treatment of citizens (Cottle and Cooper, 2015: 4). If audiences do not trust the news media to
provide reliable information, it can no longer perform these tasks.

Trust is also crucial in photojournalism, which has historically played a special role in
humanitarian journalism and witnessing (Bunce et
al., forthcoming). Early foreign correspondents, working before the camera was
invented, argued that written text was unable to convey the horrors they encountered reporting
on humanitarian crises (Curtis, 2015: 29).
Photography helped to overcome this barrier: what Scarry has called ‘pain’s
inexpressibility’ and resistance to ‘verbal objectification’ (1987). During a devastating famine in India in
1876–8, a British military official took a series of photographs depicting extremely
emaciated men, women and children, and these had a profound impact on the way British elites and
audiences mobilised and responded to the famine (Twomey,
2015). Twomey argues that this crisis introduced the practice of displaying shocking
images as ‘evidence’ of bodily suffering and deprivation that might prompt
humanitarian action (ibid.: 52).

For a photo or video footage to ‘work’, however, the audience must trust its
creator. As Roland Barthes argued, the reality of photographs, and their guarantee of
authenticity, does not rest in the photographs themselves: ‘it is lent by editors and
later by viewers who accept the claims made by texts that they are proof of
“what-has-been”’ (Barthes, 1977:
44). The proposed contract between an event and its truthful representation was hard enough to
sustain in the era of traditional, chemical photography, but it has become more difficult in the
era of digital photography, in which editing and manipulation of photos is widespread, cheap and
easy (Taylor, 2000: 132). In fact, it is strained to
breaking point now photographs are frequently disembodied from their producer and sent into the
world without any detail of their provenance.

Alarmingly, the technology that enables multimedia deception improves every day. Engineers and
programmers have created software that can mimic voice exactly; and they are on the cusp of
creating fake videos from scratch that are indistinguishable from real footage. One writer in
Atlantic Magazine has gone as far as arguing that ‘manipulated video
will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of a common
reality’ (Foer, 2018).

Who Is Making Disinformation about Humanitarian Crises?

The creators of disinformation are motivated by multiple factors. Some seek financial gain,
such as the teenagers in Macedonia who famously produced false news stories in the lead up to
the 2016 US election (Silverman & Alexander,
2016). In humanitarian crises, however, the more common driver of disinformation creation
appears to be partisanship and political influence. Humanitarian emergencies are often heavily
politicised and multiple stakeholders seek to influence their representation in the news media
and elsewhere online. Some of these groups are willing to spend considerable resources to create
fabricated websites and social media content: a continuation of long traditions of
propaganda.

Russian President Vladimir Putin oversees extensive, precise, disruptive fake-information
campaigns that are designed to cause confusion (Paul
& Matthews, 2016). At Russia’s ‘Internet Research Agency’,
hundreds of employees write content for false blogs and social media accounts. These are then
mobilised to create disinformation campaigns about issues ranging from the conflicts in Syria
and the Ukraine to an invented explosion at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana (Chen, 2015). MIT media researcher Ethan Zuckerman calls this
content ‘disinformatyza’: ‘news that’s not trying to persuade you
… it’s trying to pollute the news ecosystem, to make it difficult or impossible to
trust anything. … Disinformatyza helps reduce trust in institutions of all sorts, leading
people either to disengage with politics as a whole or to put their trust in strong leaders who
promise to rise above the sound and fury’ (2017).

In 2018, extensive disinformation campaigns were traced back to Iran, too. More than 600
Facebook pages and 300 Twitter accounts linked to the Iranian regime were shut down for their
involvement in a concerted campaign (Gilbert, 2018).
According to FireEye, the security firm that discovered the campaign, these accounts were a
coordinated operation that leveraged ‘a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of
associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in
line with Iranian interests’ (ibid., 2018), including of the
Israel–Palestine conflict, politics in North Korea and the UK’s departure from the
EU.

In Syria, there is a fervent propaganda war between the Americans, Russians and Iranians, and
between rebel and regime groups. All are extremely active online. Pro-regime Russian content
producers have created websites and attacked groups like the White Helmets, calling them
‘terrorists’ and dismissing stories about children killed by chemical attacks as
fake news featuring ‘actors’ (Solon,
2017). In articles from all sides of the campaign, there are links to official-looking
reports and the biographies of experts that seem trustworthy. It can be very difficult to
discern the provenance of information or the agenda of a source (Hayden, 2018: 15).

NGOs are not passive bystanders in this (dis)information landscape. They too engage in
strategic information campaigns and can mislead audiences with their content. A prominent
example in the 2000s was the Save Darfur Coalition, which used inflated mortality statistics to
raise awareness of the conflict in Darfur. These exaggerated claims were reproduced by many news
outlets in their reports of the conflict. The group also took out full-page newspaper adverts
alleging that Sudanese President, Omar al-Bashir, had overseen the killing of 400,000 citizens
in Darfur – double the 200,000 deaths estimated by other experts (de Waal, 2007). The adverts were ultimately ruled misleading by the British
Advertising Standards Authority; this was an embarrassing outcome that played directly into the
hands of the Sudanese government and its allegations that Western groups were exaggerating the
scale of the conflict (Mamdani, 2007).

In addition to their own campaign content, NGOs consistently and actively seek to influence
journalists and their representations of crises. This has included exaggeration of the scale of
crises and the simplification – or omission – of their root causes; it has also
included ‘media stunts’ deigned to capture the media spotlight. In her book
Who’s Reporting Africa Now? (2018), Kate Wright documents how NGOs create content and stage events that can mislead
journalists, resulting in significant, and false, news coverage (see also Franks, 2008; Cottle and Nolan,
2007).

In an ideal world, journalists would fact-check and verify all such claims before they
published them. In practice, however, news organisations are often too rushed to do this, and
even the most well-regarded and trusted outlets reproduce NGO and publicity content. Nick Davies
documents this phenomenon in his book Flat Earth News (2008), showing that vast quantities of ‘churnalism’ fill the
pages of the UK press. Working under intense resourcing pressures and required to churn out tens
of articles a day, journalists look online for existing content – press releases,
marketing material, social media posts and previously published news articles and newswire
articles – and they frequently republish this content with only slight amendments.

International news desks are under particularly intense pressures. There have been deep cuts
to the number of foreign correspondents around the world over the last twenty years (Sambrook, 2010). Today, the vast majority of news outlets
around the world do not have foreign correspondents of their own. And if they do include
international news in their media packages, it is by repurposing content produced by others
(Scott et al., 2018). The most
common sources for this content are international newswires, such as Thomson Reuters and AFP.
This is not necessarily problematic: newswires place a very high premium on accuracy and
verification of sources. But news outlets may also rely heavily on NGO content or material
discovered on social media – as was the case with ‘Syria hero boy’,
mentioned in the introduction. And this does raise the likelihood that unverified or false
information will be further disseminated.

What Can Be Done?

Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, WhatsApp and other media platforms are all under
increasing pressure to prevent harmful disinformation from circulating on their platforms. It is
vital that these massive organisations start to tackle the problem. But there are also steps
that researchers, journalists and humanitarians can take.

The first priority is further research. Although fake news has dominated public debate,
conference programming and presidential tweets for some time, we have relatively little
empirical data about its reach or impact. A number of countries have decided to introduce new
laws without this evidence base to stifle what they define as fake news. The Malaysian
government, for example, introduced legislation banning ‘news, information, data and
reports which is or are wholly or partly false’. India, the UK and France are among other
countries considering laws for misinformation. Paul Bernal, a legal researcher argues that the
‘fake news crisis’ is a straw man, an excuse for governments that have wanted to
shut down certain types of debate for some time: ‘the fake news saga… provides an
opening for them to do this. It’s a Trojan horse’ (quoted in Priday, 2018).

The second priority is securing more stable funding for humanitarian journalism. This
includes, crucially, trustworthy information reaching those communities affected by disaster.
Following the work of organisations including the CDAC Network, Internews and BBC Media Action,
we know that this is a vital form of aid: people need information as they need water, food,
medicine and shelter. Information can save lives, build resilience, support livelihoods and
empower (Hannides, 2015: 9). Information provision
should be prioritised within all humanitarian responses. In addition, international journalism
about humanitarian disasters needs financial support. This content is incredibly important but
rarely profitable, and so it is neglected by the commercial news market. This means it is vital
that citizens, foundations, philanthropists and public-service outlets value and support this
work (Scott et al., 2018).

The third priority is media literacy. We need audiences to know how to distinguish sources
that are trustworthy from those that are not. Education strategies will play a crucial role in
the global response to disinformation. Legislators in California are currently considering a
bill that would embed more media literacy into the curriculum as well as provide media-literacy
training for teachers (California News Publishers
Association, 2018). Meanwhile, the European Commission’s High Level Group for
misinformation and fake news has made a key recommendation that member countries ‘promote
media and information literacy to counter disinformation and help users navigate the digital
media environment’ (European Commission,
2018).

More broadly, we need to focus curricula on critical thinking and reasoning. Recent
interventions have shown this can be massively beneficial to students’ ability to discern
opinion and anecdote from scientific evidence. In 2016, researchers ran a huge trial involving
10,000 schoolchildren in 120 primary schools in Kampala, Uganda. The results, recently published
in The Lancet (Semakula et
al., 2017), show that children who were taught basic concepts about critical
thinking vastly outperformed the control group at a series of scenario-based tests. They were
more likely to reject arguments based on anecdote and raise doubts about health cures that had
not been scientifically tested.

Finally, news outlets and NGOs need to commit to accurate reporting and campaigning. There can
be a strong temptation for journalists and communication teams to provide exaggerated or
sensationalist accounts. This content can come from a good place – it reflects a
utilitarian ethic in which the outcome (more funds/awareness/action) is seen to justify the
means (exaggeration or fabrication). But exaggerated content can create serious, long-term
damage that far outweighs these short-term gains. It can make it harder for humanitarian groups
to respond to crises; it can cause confusion that leads audiences to ‘turn off’,
not knowing who to trust; and it can play directly into the hands of those who would discredit
journalists and activists.

It is not clear exactly how online technologies will evolve and reshape humanitarian
communications in the future. But we know that, in our new information ecology, trust is more
vital than ever before. We must support media institutions and citizens as they seek out
trustworthy sources.

Semakula, D.et
al. (2017), ‘Effects of the
Informed Health Choices Podcast on the Ability of Parents of Primary School
Children in Uganda to Assess Claims about Treatment Effects: A Randomised Controlled
Trial’, Lancet,
390:10092, 389–98,
22July.

Semakula, D.et
al. (2017), ‘Effects of the
Informed Health Choices Podcast on the Ability of Parents of Primary School
Children in Uganda to Assess Claims about Treatment Effects: A Randomised Controlled
Trial’, Lancet,
390:10092, 389–98,
22July.

Staff Security and Civilian Protection in the Humanitarian Sector

Journal Article

Publication History:

Abstract

In 2015, Action Contre la Faim launched a campaign calling on the UN to create a new post, that of a Special Rapporteur for the protection of humanitarian aid workers. Critics of the proposal claimed, inter alia, that creating such a post would imply that aid workers were a special category of civilians, worthy of protection over and above that accorded the wider population in the contexts in which they work.1 This raises an important issue which runs deeper than the campaign for a Special Rapporteur. The present article argues that, with or without such a post, the current situation is one in which humanitarian agencies treat aid workers as distinct and separate from the wider civilian population, and take significantly different measures for the safety of their staff from those they take for other civilians. For the most part, the distinction and associated differences are uncritically accepted, and this article sets out to challenge such acceptance by highlighting the nature of the differences, assessing possible explanations for the underlying distinction and considering its implications. Through this analysis, the article argues that this distinction not only reflects but also reinforces an unequal valuing of lives internationally.

Interpreting Violence on Healthcare in the Early Stage of the South Sudanese Civil War

Journal Article

Publication History:

Abstract

This article seeks to document and analyse violence affecting the provision of healthcare by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and its intended beneficiaries in the early stage of the current civil war in South Sudan. Most NGO accounts and quantitative studies of violent attacks on healthcare tend to limit interpretation of their prime motives to the violation of international norms and deprivation of access to health services. Instead, we provide a detailed narrative, which contextualises violent incidents affecting healthcare, with regard for the dynamics of conflict in South Sudan as well as MSF’s operational decisions, and which combines and contrasts institutional and academic sources with direct testimonies from local MSF personnel and other residents. This approach offers greater insight not only into the circumstances and logics of violence but also into the concrete ways in which healthcare practices adapt in the face of attacks and how these may reveal and put to the test the reciprocal expectations binding international and local health practitioners in crisis situations.

A Model for Historical Reflection in the Humanitarian Sector

Journal Article

Publication History:

Abstract

This article describes the results of a pilot project on using historical reflection as a tool for policy-making in the humanitarian sector. It begins by establishing the rationale for integrating reflection into humanitarian practice. It then looks at the growing interest in humanitarian history among practitioners and academics over the past decade and sets out the arguments for why a more formalised discussion about humanitarianism’s past could result in a better understanding of the contemporary aid environment. The main body of the article focuses on our efforts to translate that potential into practice, through a reflective workshop on Somalia since the 1990s, held at National University of Ireland, Galway, in June 2017. Drawing on our experience of that event, the article puts forward four principles on which a workable model of reflective practice might be developed: the importance of the workshop setting, how to organise the reflective process, the value of pursuing a single case study and the careful management of expectations and outcomes. This article is not intended to be prescriptive, however. Rather, our aim is to put forward some practical suggestions and to open a conversation about how a model of historical reflection for aid practitioners might be developed.

Journal Article

Publication History:

Abstract

Community engagement is commonly regarded as a crucial entry point for gaining access and securing trust during humanitarian emergencies. In this article, we present three case studies of community engagement encounters during the West African Ebola outbreak. They represent strategies commonly implemented by the humanitarian response to the epidemic: communication through comités de veille villageois in Guinea, engagement with NGO-affiliated community leadership structures in Liberia and indirect mediation to chiefs in Sierra Leone. These case studies are based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out before, during and after the outbreak by five anthropologists involved in the response to Ebola in diverse capacities. Our goal is to represent and conceptualise the Ebola response as a dynamic interaction between a response apparatus, local populations and intermediaries, with uncertain outcomes that were negotiated over time and in response to changing conditions. Our findings show that community engagement tactics that are based on fixed notions of legitimacy are unable to respond to the fluidity of community response environments during emergencies.